Obama is in trouble

Did you feel it? The political ground shifting beneath President Barack Obama since his speech last week to Congress? It's been downhill since and I'm not referring mainly to the Dow Jones record-setting dive. The pivot point of the shift was the speech, or rather what the speech did to the evolving public narrative of Obama.

Let's review:

* Since the first of the year, Rush Limbaugh's audience has exploded , according to Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post, even as his daily assaults on Obama have intensified. The conservative Talk Radio maestro has become the most listened-to radio personality in America since before Paul Harvey.

Demand for his air time hs suddenly become so intense, Limbaugh told The Examiner's Byron York earlier today, that his network sold 80 percent as much advertising in January 2009 as it did in all of 2008, and expects to sell-out the year by the end of March. That was before Obama and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel launched an explicit counter-attack against Limbaugh that seems only to be making him bigger.

* Glenn Beck's imminently forgettable presence on CNN has been transformed, according to The Los Angeles Times, by his move to Fox News where his main theme has been variations on this question - What in Heaven's name does Barack Obama think he is doing to America? Beck has a tough time slot to win big ratings because he's in the middle of evening drive-time, but in a very short time at Fox his audience is now exceeded only by Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity.

* Obama remains personally popular with the public, but worries and even outright opposition to some of his cornerstone proposals is growing. Democrats in Congress are even beginning to express in public print their worries that Obama has reached too far with the $787 billion economic stimulus package, the $410 billion omnibus spending bill and the $3.6 trillion budget proposal (and the trillions more in additional bailouts, loan guarantees, "tax cuts" that are really just grants, and other spending accountrements of Leviathan Unleashed.

* A devastatng conservative case against Obama is coming together rapidly. Two influential columns this week tell the tale: On Thursday, Daniel Henninger offers this crucial observation in a WSJ piece otherwise devoted to asking why Republicans aren't more eagerly and quickly taking advantage of the fact the Obama Democrats have all but declared war on the 75 percent of the U.S. economy that is private:

"Beyond the stock market, there is a reason why, despite much goodwill toward his presidency, the Obama response to the faltering economy has left many feeling undone. There isn't much in his plan to stir the national soul. It's about "sacrifice" now so that we can live for a future of small electric cars and windmills. This may move the Democratic Party's faith communities, but it cannot revive a great nation. If the Democrats want to embrace market failure as a basis for their ideology, let them have it. As politics, it's a downer."

The second column appeared today in The Washington Post and was written by Charles Krauthammer. Obama's mastery of public speaking has served to deflect attention away from the details of what he is actually proposing, which is based, according to Krauthammer, on a fundamental deception: Obama summons vision of catastrophe that are the result of too little government regulation of the financial markets and he offers as a solution vastly more government regulation of .... health care, energy and education.

"The 'day of reckoning' has now arrived. And because 'it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,' Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

"Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people," Krauthammer said.

Worse, Krauthammer says, is that Obama tries to have it both ways, with the alleged errors of deregulation being compounded into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression by America's failure to nationalize health care, shift our economy to alternative energy sources and give everybody a free pass to college.

In other words, Obama is trying to make the cause and the cure synonymous. "Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core," Krauthammer said.

I would only disagree that the Obama deception represents a clever political strategy. The deception represents the fundamental flaw in the Obama strategy and indeed that of the Washington liberals who are racing to enact as much of their agenda as possible before the 2010 election.

The speech to Congress was the pivot point. Before the speech, Obama was protected by a kind of political equivalent of the Star Trek Shield. His symbolizing of an historic milestone, which alone moved millions of white voters to his column, combined with his soaring rhetoric, which negated any criticism from John McCain and other Republicans of the substance of Obama's proposals.

But the magnetism of the historicity of his moment began fading once the economic stimulus, the omnibus and the budget were on the table. As people focused more on the details and how they didn't square with what they thought he had promised during the campaign, the soaring rhetoric lost much of its power. It may even now be approaching a net negative because it throws so much more light on the inaequacies of the policies.

And so the ground has shifted and the essential narrative is changing. Before, supporting Obama was an act of personal and national affirmation made all the more attractive by the seeming reasonableness of his policy proposals. In short, Obama made himself a comfortable and reassuring choice because he made it "safe" to vote for him.

But now the mask is off and the disconnect between rhetoric and reality is emerging as the dominant driver of the Obama narrative. The contrast is no longer between the young, personable, historic candidate Obama and a creaky, cranky old Republican White Guy, it's between what America thought it was getting in a President Obama (cool, reasonable and above partisanship) and what it now sees as the reality of a President Obama (government spending out of control, broken promises, more bureaucrats, etc. etc.).

Put another way - not what we were promised.

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Over!